Posts tagged with education

There's a fascinating (and horrifying) interview on NPR about the disconnect between current research on the science of reading and how it is actually taught to children, which might explain why only a third(!!!) of American schoolchildren read at grade level. The interview subject is Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist...

Over the weekend, NPR posted a fun article about a class at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts: Philosophy 280: Philosophy for Children. The class uses visits with second-graders and discussions of classic children's books—Frog and Toad Are Friends, Shrek, Horton Hears a Who!—to better understand the central tenets of philosophy...

According to Slate, Texas has agreed to include a textbook on Mexican-Americans on its list of proposed titles for the 2017-2018 school year. Seeing as 51.3 percent of the state's public-school students in 2012-2013 were Hispanic, this seems like a perfectly appropriate gesture. Unfortunately...

NPR recently featured a list of books that various colleges have chosen as required reading for their incoming college freshmen. I am only familiar with one of them—Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, which I found highly overrated...

NYMag's "Science of Us" section published an article earlier this month about the small but growing number of schools and professors who have chosen to ban laptops and smartphones from their classrooms, feeling that the technology is more of a hindrance than a help...

NPR's Planet Money recently posted an article about the win some/lose some economics of college textbook publishing. The whole thing's worth a read (it's short), but in brief: the cost of textbooks has gone waaaaay up, but the number of textbooks people buy, and how much they pay for them, has gone waaaaay down...

NPR recently posted an article about the difficulty schools are having in finding textbooks that qualify as meeting the "Common Core State Standards"—the new educational benchmarks that 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted...

Oh... my. Um. So, the website Flocabulary uses "educational Hip-Hop" to engage kids and raise test scores. Check out their song "Believe it or Not", which aims to teach children the difference between fiction and nonfiction...

Slate recently posted an interesting article by David Z. Hambrick and Christopher Chabris about the effectiveness of the SAT. The authors feel the test is far more effective (and that SAT prep companies are far less effective) than many recent articles have made them out to be...

Pakistani education activist, youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee, shooting victim, and fifteen-year-old girl Malala Yousafzai has closed a book deal, according to The Guardian. The nonfiction title I Am Malala will be published by Little, Brown and Company this fall, and describe Yousafzai's life to date...